Gallery 392
Where the magic happens.
Written by Esther Hale
On the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the furthest part of the Modern Wing, after the Miro’s and the Picasso’s and a Magritte or two lies a little slice of heaven: Gallery 392. I saw my first Kandinsky in that little nook about seven years ago, and the anticipation when I turned that corner again felt like coming off my first roller coaster: absolute thrill.
I already had my plan. Kandinsky paints the way composers write music - harmonies and melodies bleed together to form transcendent sounds that speak to us in peculiar and familiar ways. When I see Kandinsky’s work, I see jazz - harmony and disharmony of color, shape and form, all flowing together in a way that works even when convention says it shouldn’t. The first jazz track that clicked for me was Angel Eyes by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I still remember the goosebumps I felt after hearing that tune for the first time. And so here I had my golden opportunity: a perfect and complete marriage of the visual and aural experience.
Time: 3:35pm Central on a Monday afternoon. Tune: Angel Eyes from the Modern Art of Music record. Location: roughly 41.8796° N, 87.6224° W. Mix all that together? Absolute heaven.
I stood there absorbing Painting with Green Center while Blakey was cooking in my eardrums, and I felt simultaneously grounded and evaporated. As each instrument improvised with perfect mastery, each brushstroke flowed to the next and I was disembodied in a field of pitch, pigment, and percussion. I don’t know exactly how long I got lost in that sauce but when I was released from my reverie my soul had been transmogrified into a simply better state.
Kandinsky’s paintings have always sent me to that ephemeral space, the experience infinitely intensified by the sounds of James William’s piano or Blakey’s drums. Those moments are when I feel different. Not exactly immortal, but almost not being aware of mortality at all. Just a place in time and space when all that exists is music and color. The thrill of feeling connected to something beyond life and death always gives me motivation to find and create similar experiences for myself and others.
Perhaps Kandinsky does not evoke the same response in other individuals, but I share this encounter with the hope that my reader recalls (or will seek out) similar experiences of being lifted out of themselves. Find the art, find the music, put them together. Watch what happens. Does it happen to you?
Vasily Kandinsky, 1913
Painting with Green Center
Oil on canvas
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/8987/painting-with-green-center
Angel Eyes - Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers